Some of the problems that West African political economies such as Ghana's
now face -- rural differentiation and impoverishment that has been exaggerated
by the recent attempts at structural adjustment
1 -- are the logical outgrowth of
colonially initiated agriculture or mineral extraction for export and peripheral
capitalist development. As colonial administrators pursued economic
development that they deemed appropriate for the colonies, they eschewed
industrialization while increasing dependence upon mono-crop or monocommodity production.
2 In so doing, they skewed the economy to favor
urbanites and bureaucrats, with an accompanying intense exploitation of rural
resources and rural producers; and they laid the basis for the differentiation
between those who produced for export and those who engaged in food
production. For most African countries, the consequences of such dependent
economic structuring have been severe. Since independence in the late 1950s
and early 1960s, many African leaders, like Nkrumah, having been sensitized to
the problematic dynamics of neocolonial economies, have also tried to
industrialize, diversify, and create "coherent" political economies for their
societies. However, such efforts have been short-lived and were usually
frustrated because the global socioeconomic patterns had already been set and
were difficult to overcome.

These socioeconomic patterns highlight some of the thorny and persisting
issues in contemporary African rural organization. For example, the
differentiation between export and food farmers was becoming evident during
the 1930s and 1940s, as children of prosperous farmers migrated to urban areas,
but it has become even more dramatic today. These new strata created by cocoa
established linkages between urban and rural areas, but more importantly, they
symbolized the differences in social status between urbanites and rural peasant
realities. As these children became urban civil servants, bureaucrats, and service

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